Being Vampire
by NonyMouse
Summary: Curiosity killed the Cutler. Good thing he was already dead.


**AN:** I am so sad that BH is ending soon, and I'm rather worried that they're going to kill off Hal. But then I remember that Cutler's been dead for a whole season now, and if Hal dies then they can meet up. They can finally have a chance to be together, and they can yell at each other, get their feelings out in the open, and go to Couples' Counseling for Dead Things. They won't even be able to kill anyone and ruin everything, because everyone they meet will be dead! If Hal does die in the last episode, this is going to become my headcannon of his afterlife. In the meantime, have a Hal/Cutler early days fic.

* * *

"I would not have figured you for the snooping sort."

Hal's soft voice interrupted Cutler's aimless wandering (what, he was new), and the young vampire spun around, a guilty look on his face that he immediately tried to erase.

"W-what do you mean?" The stuttering certainly didn't help. He squared his shoulders. Hal had no proof of anything (again, he was new, and he'd always been a curious person; it wasn't like he was creating some nefarious plot against Hal, or anything).

"Please, Cutler, your scent was all over my room." Cutler shivered at the way his name slid smoothly from Hal's tongue. "Now tell me, what _exactly_ were you trying to find?"

"I was looking for the bathroom." As soon as he said, Cutler knew how stupid his excuse sounded.

Hal merely raised one perfect eyebrow. "The bathroom?" he asked, sardonic disbelief heavy in his tone.

Cutler decided he may as well stick to his story, now that he had begun. "Yes," he said defiantly. "I got lost in this place. It's still only my first day!"

"Actually, it's your second day."

Cutler figured he should have known that excuse wouldn't work. Hal was the one who _made_ him after all. No harm came from trying, though (of course, this was a blatantly untrue saying, but at least it _sounded _nice). "I were counting this as my first day, since yesterday was such a blur. I can barely remember it."

That also was not strictly true. It would be more honest to say that Cutler did not want to remember the previous day: the way the woman (his first victim) had screamed as his fangs sliced deftly through the soft skin at her throat; how she had whined with pain for a few long seconds as her life force gurgled out and into Cutler's hungry mouth; the sticky way that the blood had clung to his lips once he was done licking the last few drops from her corpse; and last but not least, the way Hal's mouth had felt as it closed over his, Hal's tongue licking the sticky sweet remains from his lips and one of Hal's hands twisting in his hair while the other raked blunt nails down his back.

Cutler had been little better than a wild dog on his first vampire day.

A wild dog with a rather unexpected sex drive.

Hal smiled at him, and he gulped. That was the same smile Hal had given him in that prison cell right before his eyes went black and he changed Cutler's life forever. He sincerely hoped he wasn't about to get himself staked already. It really had been just a bit of _harmless_ snooping.

"No one forgets their first day," Hal said, "but it can be rather… disorienting." Hal's tongue darted out, swept over the corner of his mouth as though in remembrance of the blood that had coated both their mouths just the day before. Cutler could not decide if the hunger coiling in his gut was bloodlust or lust of a different sort. He was not entirely sure he wanted to know.

"I should probably be going now." Cutler did his best to make his voice both firm and unassuming.

Hal, of course, just continued to smile, creepy bastard that he was.

"Actually," he said, after a too long moment of awkward silence, "I thought I would show you around properly, make sure you don't get lost again on your way to the 'bathroom.'"

"Right, um," Cutler began, casting about for a reason to escape, but Hal was having none of it.

"Come now, Cutler," he said, his mouth still quirked in that infernal smirk. "I have been remiss in my duties, if you could get so lost as to mistake my bedroom for a toilet."

Cutler would have flushed, if he still could. "Y-you really don't hafta," he said. "I'm sure I've got my way sorted out, now."

"I should hope so," Hal said. "Still, I insist."There was definitely mocking laughter in Hal's eyes, Cutler would swear to it.

So it was that Cutler found himself trailing after Hal about the vampire's (Home? Den? Lair? What did one call a vampire abode?) place, not quite paying attention as Hal introduced him to dull faced lackeys he had not had the presence of mind to notice in the heat of the previous day's activities. Most of them had clearly been recruited as little more than mindless muscle. Hal seemed to like surrounding himself with idiots. Cutler hoped this did not extend to him. That would be right embarrassing, if Hal's whole history maker speech in the prison cell had been nothing more than line he fed to all his new fools, like a pickup line used by sleazy men in cheap bars. They _had_ met in prison, after all. If his old gran were still alive, she'd probably have something not very nice to say about that.

Near the end of the tour, Cutler finally figured out where Hal was planning to end up. Hal stopped outside the door to his room, the nicest one at the top of the hotel they were staying in, and gestured to it. "Would you like to be invited in, this time?" he asked.

"I have got a wife, you know," Cutler said, regretting the words as soon as they passed his lips.

If anything, Hal's answering smirk was even more dangerous than his usual grins. "You could bleed people dry with that thing," he muttered. Hal raised an eyebrow.

"I mean, you've got a very interesting smile," Cutler said, digging himself deeper into his hole. Maybe Hal should have bitten his tongue off the other day.

Hal actually laughed. He tilted his head back and chuckled quietly in surprise, and now it was Cutler's turn to raise an eyebrow at his maker. He would bet he didn't look half as good as Hal when he did so, though.

"You're different than most people, Cutler," Hal said, and Cutler swore the older vampire was _purring._ His voice was soft, smooth, and seductive, and Cutler had never heard anything so arousing in his life.

He decided he really should find some time to look into vampire transformations, and find out if they had an affect on a person's libido as well as their diet.

"Weren't you planning to invite me in?" he asked, and well, that was not at all what he had been planning to say.

He could not regret his treacherous mouth, however, when Hal licked his lips again and leaned past Cutler to push open his door, his arm brushing against Cutler's side in the process and sending delightful tingles down his spine. Hal entered the room first, and as he slid past Cutler with a grace that ought to come with a warning sign, he tilted his head to whisper in Cutler's ear. "Coming?"

Oh, Cutler had no doubt he would be coming.

Once inside the room, Cutler heard the door close and the lock click with a sound half ominous and half exciting. He turned to find Hal standing by the door, eyes dark in a way that had nothing to do with his vampirism. Cutler swallowed, suddenly rather uncertain. This whole lack of control thing that came with being a young vampire was rather frustrating.

Hal stalked towards him, and Cutler was reminded of a wolf stalking its prey. Cutler had already been prey once, thank you very much. He straightened up, forcing himself not to hunch, and cleared his throat. "I'm not quite sure w-what you want me here for (lies!), but-" he got out before Hal's mouth was on his, and Hal was pushing him backwards until the backs of his knees hit the bed.

He fell backwards on to red silk sheets, Hal bearing down on top of him. Hal growled low in his throat and began kissing a line along Cutler's jaw. "You're _mine_," he said, growling into Cutler's ear before ducking down and sinking his fangs into Cutler's shoulder.

Cutler hissed at the unexpected pain. "What are you-" he said, but Hal shut him up with another kiss.

"I _made_ you," he said against Cutler's lips. "You are _mine_, and in the future you will obey me, or I will kill you." Cutler bit down on a scream, tasting his own blood, as Hal bit down on his other shoulder.

The sound of his own flesh tearing brought equal waves of terror and pleasure crashing through Cutler's body, and he arched upwards, desperate for more contact between his body and Hal's. Hal, of course, moved away as soon as he felt Cutler press against him.

He sat up and licked the blood from his lips, his weight heavy on Cutler's stomach. "Go eat someone," he said, his voice back to his usual dispassionate drawl. "You're still new, and you can't afford to be losing too much blood right now unless you're eating regularly."

Cutler glanced down at his shoulders, realizing that his nice shirt was all torn up and covered in his blood. It oozed strangely from the bites, trickling out in much too slow a stream to be healthy. Of course, he reminded himself, it was rather difficult to be healthy when one was already dead.

"Right," he said, though he shuddered at the thought of feeding again. His throat still burned with the hunger that Hal told him would never go away, but he could still remember how that girl had screamed and begged for her god before he killed her. "Do you have any blood on hand already, maybe in a nice thermos?" he asked, not quite hopefully. "Only, I'm afraid I'm not quite sure how to go about this hunting business, and I wouldn't want to muck it up on my first day."

"Second day," Hal said, already moving away from Cutler, who still lay shivering on the bed. "Get Fergus to take you. He should be able to keep you under control."

Several hours later, Cutler had completely failed to get himself a meal. The girl Fergus helped him track into an alley had given him one sad, terrified look, and he had thought of how he'd feel if it was his wife, Rachel, getting stalked by vampires and been unable to kill her.

Fergus had no such reservations. After giving Cutler a disgusted look, the girl had quickly been reduced to a cooling corpse on the dirty ground. When Cutler had realized that Cutler was not planning to save a single drop for the new recruit, he had attempted to speak up, saying, "A-aren't you supposed to be h-helping me get food?"

Fergus had ignored him until the girl was drained dry, then turned a thoroughly unimpressed look on Cutler. Cutler wanted to inform him that his unimpressed looks had nothing on Hal's, but he held his tongue with a great effort of will.

"You want food, you kill it yourself," Fergus had told him, sneering. "Our Lord Harry won't be much impressed if you have to survive off the scraps left behind by his men, as if you were some kind of carrion bird. You're a predator, so act like it."

Hal was displeased when the two returned home, of course, but he only rolled his eyes and handed Cutler a glass of blood from a crystal decanter.

"Some take a bit more time than others to grow used to their new place in the world," Hal said, giving Cutler a smirk, as though he could tell that Cutler's mind had just flashed back to his earlier place beneath Hal. "I'm sure you'll be just fine once you get over your squeamishness."

Cutler nodded at Hal. He could get over his squeamishness if it meant becoming a history maker. He just had to learn how to kill people without remorse.

Ironically, enough, considering the end of his earlier activities - yeah, he was fucked.


End file.
